Amédée de Murcia - The Wheel/Claustrum

 Released: October 31

This lovely little jaunt from French composer and artist Amédée de Murcia is a beautiful swirling mess of synthesized wonder. A strange bit of sound driven art, The Wheel/Claustrum is technically a two part album with the two main pieces being in the title. But the digital version of the album specifically includes several bonus tracks that show a bit great deal of divergence in the possibilities of the two main pieces. And this divergence is quite wild indeed, but let us stick to the main two pieces at first. 

The first of these two “The Wheel” embodies the spirt of a wheel intricately as it speeds up and slows down at seemingly unpredictable intervals, choosing its speed as it goes without a care. There are several sounds at play throughout the composition, all of which operate at roughly the same wildly varied tempo as one another. It will slow down without warning, only suddenly pick back up into a fast clip of a pace as each element bounces about at will. “Claustrum” on the other hand, takes its approach much slower and sparser. The sounds clunk around and ping about, filling the stereo space with percussive tings and taps. But unlike the other side of this coin, “Claustrum” leaves much more space in between the sounds. Each sound gets its own space and it has plenty of it. It feels like the perfect contrast to the more chaotic energy of “The Wheel.” 

As we listen through he digital version, the adventure continues with several bonus pieces. These vary wildly but generally keep with the same aesthetics as the primary two pieces. Of these bonuses, my personal favorite is the bizarre oddity of “My Avatar Is Controlling Me.” It opens up with these halfhearted synthetic horn sounds, or at least that what I think they are. But as these opaque melodies play on, they are joined by some odd percussion-like textures that change the entire mood of the track, giving it a dramatic veneer that contrast with the slightly comical nature of the introductory synth sounds. I personally enjoyed this one the most but the other bonuses here have some very interesting choices as well like the drone-adjacent noises of “Accidents Form” and the swirling mess “Contours.”